Research Projects

Smart meters and related technologies are becoming a noteworthy aspect of residential electrical power systems as proper energy feedback can result in significant energy savings. Smart meters also facilitate implementation of "time of use" (TOU) pricing for the residential sector. Results of Advanced Meter Infrastructure (AMI) pilot studies reveal that it is possible to save 12-15 % of energy saving and maximum demand shifting to low peak time when appliance specific disintegrated real-time energy feedback is provided to consumers or controllers. With current technology, appliance level detection requires costly hardware installation and is quite impossible to deploy in large scale AMIs. It would be much more cost effective to predict appliance level consumption using smart meters already installed in premises. However, smart meter has only one current transducer per phase, rendering appliance usage detection challenging

The smart grid is the future of the power grid. Smart meters and the associated network play a major role in the distributed system of the smart grid. Advance Metering Infrastructure (AMI) can enhance the reliability of the grid, generate efficient energy management opportunities and many innovations around the future smart grid. These innovations involve intense research not only on the AMI network itself but as also on the influence an AMI network can have upon the rest of the power grid. This research describes a smart meter testbed with hardware in loop that can facilitate future research in an AMI network. The smart meters in the testbed were developed such that their functionality can be customized to simulate any given scenario such as integrating new hardware component to a smart meter or developing new encryption algorithm in the firmware. These smart meters were integrated into the power system simulator to simulate the power flow variation in the power grid with various AMI activities. Each smart meter in the network also provides a communication interface to the home area network. This research delivers a testbed to emulate the AMI activities and monitor their effect on the smart grid.

AMI base distributed energy resources integration: Ongoing

With evolving smart grid technology considerable effort and focus is place on distributed energy resources and their management in order to achieve stable and reliable power network. These distributed energy resources could be individual energy sources and storages or it could be a small grid consisting several of them. Concept of microgrid was presented way before the concept of smart grid came in to the action. In its early ages microgrids were basically a collection of energy sources and storages isolated from the main grid and eventually the microgrids were tend to tie to the central grid. Islanding techniques were introduced to isolate these microgrids from the main grid at the occurrence of a fault in either side. In order to achieve smooth islanding from and smooth reconnection to the main grid as well as the stability and the reliability of a microgrid, it must be monitored and controlled continuously and accurately. Certain data and information on both side of the network is required to have accurate and smooth control over the transitions in microgrid and its individual sources. With the new technology improved with smart grid, more data and information can be collected using Advance Metering Infrastructure (AMI) which mainly occupies smart meters. This research focuses on microgrid monitoring and control techniques. The data and information needed for successful implementation of those techniques and how we can utilize AMI to collect the required data.